India / Viral pic of NYT front page calling PM Modi 'world's most loved leader' is fake

New Delhi: A viral image claiming to show The New York Times’ front page from Sunday, 26 September, carrying a story on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has gone viral with a claim that the publication touted the Indian PM as the "Last, Best Hope of Earth".

This comes on the back of PM Modi's three-day US visit that concluded on Sunday. During his visit, he addressed the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), attended the Quad summit and attended multiple bilateral engagements.

However, we found that the viral image is a fabricated one and NYT didn’t feature PM Modi on its Sunday front page.

CLAIM

Social media users who shared the viral photo seemed to believe that the photograph was real. Sharing the photograph, one user said, "Shri Narendra Modi ji's. US trip reaction of American people, which came out in New York Times"

The image is being massively shared by several users on Facebook and Twitter, archives of which can be found here, here and here.

We also received multiple queries about the image on our Tipline number.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We conducted a keyword search for the headline of the article mentioned in the viral photograph and didn't find any such story on NYT's website.

Further, the front page of the daily from 26 September didn't carry any story on PM Modi.

We also noticed that the viral clipping misspelt "SEPTEMBER" as "SETPEMBER". The caption of the photograph said, "His Highness, Modiji is signing on a blank a4 paper to bless our country... har har mahadev."

The font and style used in the viral image, too, didn't match with NYT's fonts.

We also conducted a reverse image search on the viral photograph on Google and found that the image of PM Modi was first shared on his own website.

Evidently, a fabricated image of The New York Times’ late edition was used to claim that the newspaper carried a story on PM Modi titled, “Last, Best Hope of Earth”.